GEOS managed to offer nearly all the functionality of the original Mac in a 1 MHz computer with 64 Kilobytes of RAM. It wasn't an OS written to run on a generic x86 chip on a moving hardware platform. It was written using immense knowledge of the hardware and the tricks one could use to maximise speed. Note:After a small break, here is another one of the articles for the Alternative OS contest.

To continue on with the UI concepts. The UI had about a dozen basic classes you could pick from. You would create the object you wanted, and specify hints that told the OS what the object was for. The OS would figure out how to visually represent the object.

It really made UI programming so much simpiler than in other GUIs, where you have a seperate class with a different API for each variation of widget.

Also, by default, the UI of a GEOS app ran on a seperate thread from the processing. That made sure the UI always ran smoothly.